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This interview was transcribed by Ms. Seamond M.
Roberts, CMT, and we wish to acknowledge her assistance.

Smith: O.K., we are
talking about Operation Deep Freeze 1983 aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Polar
Star. I am Captain Joseph F. Smith, and I was then the Commanding
Officer of the vessel during the rather historic cruise we made between
October 19, 1982 and May 2, 1983. I guess in chronological order, the trip
went something like this: We departed Seattle on the 19th of
October, headed for refresher training. That is a Navy training exercise or
period in San Diego, California, designed to run the ship through various
drills and exercises such that the resultant is that the ship is better
prepared to cope with its job and the day-to-day emergencies that may arise
in a seagoing environment. Before we left San Diego, it is kind of
interesting in joshing with the various officers and some of the people, we
had pre-planned the trip and we were joking one day about what I wanted on
the trip – or what I wanted out of the trip, and I said, "Well,
I’ll tell you, I’m getting kind of old and tired and I’ve been to sea
before, and if I could have 6-1/2 months of flat calm, fair winds and
following seas, I think that is what I would wish for most." Well, we
left Seattle on the 19th of October and the first night out, why
it was blowing about 55 knots. It was getting up to gale force, pretty close
to hurricane force winds, and it was sloppier than the devil and what
happens first is that we have a steering casualty. For those of you who
don’t know, that is just like driving down the street in your automobile
and your steering goes out. In this case, it resulted in the ship broaching,
or pulling parallel to the seas and rolling violently. Unfortunately, the
only casualty we had was the Captain’s brand-new stereo in the captain’s
cabin which I had recently been working on and it fell on its face and
broke, and, of course, needless to say, I took quite a bit of teasing about
that for the rest of the trip, especially I am the one who is usually ON
EVERYBODY else’s back about securing things, and so forth.

So, it starts out with a bit of a humorous twist and
some really sloppy weather and I thought, "Oh, my goodness, is this a
forerunner or portent of things to come? Are we going to have 6-1/2 months
of lousy crummy weather?" The answer to that, quite frankly, was
"no." That was the last bad weather essentially we saw in the
whole trip and indeed with a few exceptions the dream came true and we just
had a super trip.

On of our goals, of course, in San Diego was to do
very well in our training period down there and we exited from San Diego
having earned a ship’s E or an excellent evaluation in both seamanship and
engineering – the first E’s earned by the ship since its construction
and, of course, needless to say, the crew as a whole was very generally
pleased to have done so well and that boded well for our trip.

We proceeded from the San Diego area to a place called
Port Hueneme, California, a little port just north of Los Angeles where we
loaded cargo in support of various scientific efforts in the Antarctic
scene. We spent a couple of days there, loading approximately 350
measurement tons of cargo, and from there we started working our way South.
We didn’t work our way too far South initially when we stopped in Long
Beach, which is just down the road a hop-skip-and a jump. Our schedule had
changed somewhat, so that we had a little flexibility and a little time to
kill, so we enjoyed that by spending a short port call in Long Beach so that
the troops could see Disney Land and the local Los Angeles scene for those
of them who had never seen the Southern California atmosphere.

From there, we proceeded to Acapulco, Mexico, where we
had a four-day port visit which was very delightful, and from there we
started to get serious in that we headed for Valparaiso, Chile, which is a
port on the west coast of South America at which we call to pick up a few of
the scientists which we would be taking and transporting to the Antarctic
continent. We stopped in Valparaiso, again about 4-5 days, a rather
uneventful stay. We picked up a couple of dozen of various scientific
personnel of various disciplines and thence proceeded to the Antarctica
continent, specifically the Antarctic Peninsula, and a U.S. station by the
name of Palmer Station.

On our trip to Palmer, we departed a little bit from
the usual route in that south of Valparaiso, we turned in a little entrance
which provided access to what they call the Patagonian Channels. It’s
Chile’s answer – as it were – to the inside passage between Seattle,
Washington and southeastern Alaska for example – a very picturesque
cruise. There were a couple of reasons for doing that: One, to get out of
the slop and the roll of the heavy seas off the Chilean coast and also, you
know, provide a little more scenic pictures for the kids to send home to mom
and dad and their loved ones and so forth, and also to essentially train our
officers the deck, in that they have to keep on their toes a little bit more
when they are in traffic, as it were in the congested areas as opposed to
the open sea.

We arrived in Palmer Station, having traversed the
Patagonian Channels and we passed through the Beagle Channel and out around
Cape Horn, across The Great Passage, and arriving on the 24th of
December in Palmer. Fortunately, the weather was good, so we anchored
immediately and tied off our stern to the beach and proceeded to off-loading
our cargo and also fueling the station, as well as dropping the scientists
off that had ridden down with us.

Not to look for heroics or anything, but we did work
around-the-clock essentially on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and we held
Christmas, as it were, on the 26th of December, the reason for
that being that despite the fact that generally speaking we had good weather
then and for the rest of the trip, the weather can change terribly
dramatically in the Antarctic in essentially in a matter of minutes, as
those of you that have been there can attest to. So, needless to say that
when we had good weather, we worked then and then we slept or hibernated
when the weather turned bad. So, we didn’t want to take any chances and
the people at Palmer were, of course, were very cooperative, too.

A rather interesting point of observation in that they
are essentially civilian and we are military and it’s kind of interesting
in that we don’t worry too much about overtime and frankly the union
concept down there – it’s a little bit old-fashioned in that everybody
works and everybody works hard and when they get the job, then they play.
So, they were cooperative and we had a good stay in Palmer.

Then, on approximately the 26th of
December, we departed Palmer Station on essentially was later to be a rather
historic circumnavigation or circling of the Antarctic continent, below the
latitude of 60 degrees south, and while the Coast Guard itself had started a
couple of these trips before, they had either aborted for one reason or
another, or had not actually circumnavigated the entire Antarctic continent
before.

We worked our way across the Bellinghausen Sea into
the Ross Sea and then eventually to the U.S. station at McMurdo in the
Antarctic, which is the major U.S. effort down there, and in fact, in the
summer time, they have a population you know of approaching a thousand
people. Now, that is not very large of course, but one must remember that on
the entire Antarctic continent there are no indigenous people down there,
that is to say there are no natives, as it were, except the scientific
people from the various countries who go down there for the various
scientific experiments that they conduct, so obviously a thousand people is
a pretty good base down there, but not large in terms of the urbanization of
the rest of the world.

The main job we have in McMurdo is simply to get
through the ice that has formed across what they call McMurdo Sound, break
through that, thereby causing a path to be opened for the tanker which
brings in the fuel without which they cannot exist and also a supply ship, a
dry cargo vessel subsequent to the tanker which brings in of course the
other supplies that are necessary to the effort down there.

This year, speaking of records, we ran into another
one. We had almost 30 miles of ice to slog through to the base at McMurdo
and the trick here is for our vessel to break through the ice and then hope
for a wind shift around blowing from the south such that all this ice is
blown out – this little narrow opening we have created – into the open
sea and thereby creating as it were a highway through the ice through which
the tanker and the cargo vessel can go by themselves.

Unfortunately, we broke the ice all up, but the good
old wind would not cooperate and therefore when the tanker got there, we had
to ice escort the vessel through. The way you do that is that you bring them
up very, very close astern and you assume a certain speed and then just hope
he can keep with you. If he gets too far away, the ice floe closes in
between the ice breaker and the ship following and causes the other vessel,
which is not designed for this, to slow down and stop and in the process of
getting going again, this is very frustrating and difficult, if not, indeed,
dangerous. We were very fortunate, through good seamanship on the part of
the tanker skipper that we made it through about the last 16 miles of ice
with only one stop and successfully got into winter’s quarters bay and he
tied up and re-fueled.

We spent perhaps 10 days in that area, doing a number
of things. They had some problems with a dock, called the ice wharf, which
is just a giant floating ice cube which is manmade actually, and the reason
for making this big ice cube is that so they can pull it up against the
beach, the outboard side of which is kind of a sheer vertical surface along
which ships can tie up without grounding on the bottom. This ice wharf had
gotten away from them through the winter and we had to use demolition or
explosives to blow up the ice that had gotten between the beach and the
wharf and then flush it out with our screw current and then push, as it
were, the ice wharf back in against the beach. Fortunately, we did all of
this without breaking it, so the operation was quite successful.

We, of course, on the lighter side while we at McMurdo,
they have developed a race, a short race of about 5-6 miles. They hold this
annually, called the Scott’s Hut Race. Some of our young men participated
in this. Unfortunately, I guess we are not acclimatized to the same extent
that the "natives" are down there. We did, however, get a 10th
place out of incredibly about 400 runners that are involved in this thing.
Virtually, everybody gets out there and if you can believe this, run around
in their shorts at about 35 degrees Fahrenheit – that’s just right above
freezing for about 5-6 miles. In fact, the young man that won it was in fact
just in shorts period, no T-shirt and just sneakers. Of course, I guess you
can obviously see if that he runs hard enough and fast enough, he is going
to generate his own warmth. However, it was just a bit incredible to me!

Again, on the lighter side, while we were there, we
started the first around-the-world golf tournament which is really just
really a semi-gag in that the guys got out on the ice and used an orange
golf ball – what else? The only problem is that every time you hit the
ball, you can’t find it again, because ice is very friction-less and of
course for those of you that are duffers and can’t hit the ball very far,
why maybe you ought to take up playing on ice and then you get those
800-yard drives.

At any rate, we finally got the tanker in there and
completed our work around the McMurdo area and then we started to get
serious and we proceeded North – obviously every direction is North from
the South Pole – and commenced our inspection trip of other countries
stations.

Now, for those of you that don’t know, let me
digress here to explain just a little bit about the Antarctic continent.
First of all, you never see the Antarctic continent on the usual wall map
you might see about your offices because of the geometry of the situation
and the projection of the map. There is just no way of showing the Antarctic
continent unless you get a bird’s eye view looking down on the South Pole
and since not too many people are interested in it, you obviously don’t
see many maps, or charts as we call them.

O.K., it was at this point when we departed the
McMurdo area that we really got into the meat of the sandwich, as it were,
and started our real mission – our primary mission, that is, and that was
to deliver a four-person Department of State team to 10 stations of other
nations on the periphery of the Antarctic continent.

Just a brief description of the Antarctic continent,
if you look down from the South Pole on the Antarctic continent, you will
see a very large land mass, as opposed to the Arctic, which, of course, is
nothing but ocean; and this land mass is actually somewhat larger than the
48 United States, the continental United States in an area, and on top of
this land mass, you will see almost up to two miles of ice stacked. For
example, at the South Pole, the altitude there is about 8,000 to 9,000 feet,
and in fact we land airplanes up there right on the ice. That is how we
maintain our station at the South Pole, so that is kind of what it looks
like, and we were relieving the Ross Sea, which is south of the islands that
form the country New Zealand, and we were going to go to the west, or
counterclockwise looking down on it from above the South Pole, and the first
station we came to is the Russian station of Leningrad Skyia.

The Russians, incidentally, seem to have a penchant
for picking some really crummy locations in that they get perched up there
on some ridges where the wind blows and it is COLD and thoroughly miserable.
I think perhaps the first station was one of the toughest ones, in that as
you guessed it, Murphy’s Law struck, and at all times, one of our
helicopters went down with a bad part and we really wanted both helicopters
to ferry this four-man team into these stations. The Navy, from McMurdo, got
the part for us and flew it out in a C-130 aircraft and air-dropped it to us
right on the ice and we picked it up by helicopter by lowering a man to the
ice and picked up the part and back to the ship, fixed the helicopter, and
away we went.

I might describe the four-man Department of State team
in that it was made up of a career State Department fellow by the name of Al
Chapman. He was in charge. He had another career State Department fellow by
the name of Ron Gate, who was fluent in seven languages including Russian
and Japanese, and he was there primarily for his linguistic ability, and
then they were supplemented by an Army colonel who had expertise in nuclear
devices, and finally we had a female Navy commander, who was a scientific
type and also fluent in Russian and Polish. Interestingly enough, she was a
very attractive lady and going back to the Russian station of Leningrad
Skyia, some of those gentleman had been there for over two years without
having left there, and, needless to say, folks, when you get a female
commander amongst 24 men that have not seen anybody in two years, why the
other three fellows might just not have existed.

That was one of the lighter things that took place.

Now, the purpose of this circumnavigation trip and the
inspection trip – as we call it – is just that. The Antarctic does not
belong to anybody per se. There is a treaty to which various nations are
signatories and one of the unique provisions of the Antarctic Treaty is that
they have an open door policy – really – and you can drop in any time
and visit these folks, and that was exactly what we were doing. Why, of
course, is to see that yes, they are not establishing nuclear plants or
things of that nature in violation of the Antarctic Treaty, and that is what
we did.

From the Leningrad Skyia station, we proceeded
westbound again and we covered ultimately 14 stations. We managed to get
into the seven primary targets, the three secondaries, and we were having
such good luck and through some skillful flying and so forth, we also
managed to get four unscheduled stations. The stations included eight
different nationalities. They included Russian stations. They included
Australian stations. They included British, West German, the Japanese, the
Argentineans, and in fact the Union of South Africa has a station down
there.

One of the more interesting anecdotes that we had is
that as we approached the Australian station of Casey, we got in a call on a
radio at Casey saying that they had received a radio transmission from a
65-foot sail boat who was beset in the ice and heard us and wanted to see if
we could get some help in breaking him loose. Needless to say, we weren’t
terribly eager because our time frame was very, very short, and breaking a
65-foot vessel out of the ice – that kind of ice – without it up itself
is perhaps more luck than skill. In any event we were kind of, shall we say,
trapped by the humanitarian aspects, so after we had visited the Australian
station, we proceeded to the geographic location of this boat , which turned
out to be a vessel by the name of Dick Smith Explorer.

Well, of course for those of you without any
Antarctic, to see a 65-foot sail boat with ice stacked up around it, one
wonders, you know, about the mental approach of those people that are on the
boat, and quite frankly, I thought they were all a bunch of nuts – not
knowing who they were.

To make a long story short, we got there about
midnight. Of course, this time of the year we are getting a few hours of
darkness around the hour of midnight locally, and through a little luck and
a little skill, we managed to bust them loose and they bounced down the side
of the ship and fell in behind us and a little piece of wake we got there,
and after a couple of adjustments, they managed to hang in there, and about
six hours later we got them to the open water.

By that time, I was, you know, quite curious as to who
they were, so there were only six people on board and I invited them aboard
for breakfast. The master turns out to be a fellow by the name of Dave
Lewis. Dave, as a matter of fact, has written a published an article in I
think it was the February 1983 issue of National Geographic, and as
luck would have it, he turns out to be a rather experienced Antarctic
explorer. He has sailed a vessel called the Iceberg single-handedly
around the Antarctic continent in the past, and similar feats of deering-do.
An amusing anecdote. The other five were two females, young females, and
three other male scientists and where they were headed for was south of the
station. They were going to tie up essentially to the Antarctic continent
and perform various experiments and they are still there. I have a letter
from the Australian foundation which sponsors them that thanked us and they
are coming out in April of 1984 I understand.

One last story, the young lady who serves as the
executive officer, or second-in-command, or first mate, or whatever you want
to call her, is a young 30-year-old American girl, an anthropologist whose
purpose of making the trip was to write her doctoral thesis on essentially
the subject of what happens to human beings confined in small spaces for a
long period of time – and, of course, that kind of broke us up. That was
pretty amusing, and as I said, I don’t think she could find a better
atmosphere for an experiment.

At any rate, we continued proceeding around the
Antarctic continent. I think perhaps the record flight was off one of the
Russian stations. The last Russian station we visited was a station clear
around on the other side of the Antarctic continent. Now, here we had to
take the ship right up near the beach, or the glaciers that form what looks
like no other beach in the world in that these glaciers are perhaps as high
as 400 feet.

The next significant event was the penetration of the
United States Coast Guard Polar Star to what I believe is the furthest point
south in the Weddell Sea that a U.S. flag vessel has even been. We did this
in conjunction with a visit to an Argentine station down there, and also, in
order to rendezvous with the brand-new West German icebreaker called the
Polar Stahren. Now, for those of you who don’t know, the German word
"Stahren" means "star," so, literally, or ironically,
the Polar Star met the Polar Star – down in the deep Weddell Sea one
morning and we parked in the ice, near each other perhaps about two city
blocks away, and we took the time to visit back and forth with both the
sailor type personnel and our scientific personnel chatted and went back and
forth. The West Germans, of course, have an entirely different kind of
vessel from ours. We feel perhaps ours is a little bit better hull shape and
perhaps a little bit more capable of breaking ice, but certainly in the
field of human/creature comfort, I must confess that the West Germans had it
all over us. For example, they have four of the world’s finest cocktail
lounges aboard that I have ever seen – one of which is only four steps
down from the bridge. Now, for what they use them for . . . I have no idea,
but certainly it makes them significantly different from our rather in
comparison austere vessels. At any rate, we had a very fine visit there for
perhaps 4-5 hours and then we went on our way.

We extracted from the Weddell stays what might be
characterized as almost a speed run. It is absolutely incredible to me as a
sailor that we could have left Seattle on October 19th, planned
this whole trip and done it – JUST LIKE WE SAID WE WERE GOING TO DO IT!

We did everything we set out to do and more and we
essentially did it on schedule in an environment where the wind and the
weather and the elements are incredibly capricious and despite that, thought
a lot of luck and a lot of hard work and maybe even some cleverness, we
managed to pull it off. So, we were very proud I think to have completed
this in only 69 days and really have done the job.

At that point, we picked up our scientists and we
headed for . . . .

Question: How many did you have on
the Star?

O.K., the people on board the Polar Star are
approximately 125 enlisted of our own crew. We have got about 15 officers,
and when we sail we bring two helicopters along and that also brings with it
four aviators – four officer aviators – and 10 aviation ratings to take
care of the machines – and, in addition to that, at any one time we may
have as many as two dozen or a few more scientific people on board. So,
during the trip around, we had approximately 170-180 people on the ship.

Question: What was the most
significant thing to happen on the trip?

I think the most significant thing that happened on
the whole trip is the unusual psychological upbeatness, or morale, of the
entire crew. They never had a downer or a low period in the entire 6-1/2
months. I find that just incredible, having made long voyages before. There
is just no way that you don’t have a little lull, or down point, and
because of a lot of incredibly fine people, we just had super morale, and I
really find this the more incredible thing of the whole voyage.